When Pim de Witte (30) discovered it eight years ago gaming platform Medal.tv founded, he did so mainly out of his love for games. Medal allows gamers to record short videos of the games they play and share them with friends. The company is successful, . AI companies are eager to train their models with it.
OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, reportedly has half a billion dollars to buy. . Instead, at the beginning of this year he started a new company, General Intuition, that will train AI models with the game data.
“We have also investigated whether it can be obtained in another way,” De Witte said this week with a slightly American accent in a interview of News hour. He does not rule out that he will eventually have to sell his company, because their lead over other AI parties is decreasing. “It’s just much more fun to do it yourself.”
Investors also seem convinced of the value of the gaming data. In October it raised an exceptionally high amount of 115 million euros. For Vinod Khosla, it was his largest investment since OpenAI in 2018, he told tech site The Verge.
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With General Intuition, Europe has gained a new and potentially important AI player. Because although De Witte has lived in Medal’s New York office for years, his companies are .
Pim de Witte grew up in Nijmegen. As a child he liked to play games. De Witte suffers from tics, but in a virtual world he was “just like any other child,” he said in 2023. The Peel podcast. He preferred to play RuneScape, an online fantasy world in which you can complete assignments together with other players. When the game changed and his favorite parts were removed, De Witte decided to put together his own version.
At the age of thirteen, he taught himself to program and built a server on which his version of Runescape, called Soulsplit, ran. At the age of seventeen, De Witte even quit high school to work on the game. Soulsplit grew into the largest alternative server to support a version of . Before it closed in 2014, Soulsplit had more than 3 million users and was running a . The average age of the players was 13 years old, the young entrepreneur said in the same year It F.D.
De Witte worked for Doctors Without Borders in London from 2015 on projects with satellite images and digital patient files during the Ebola crisis. As a result, he ended up on the work floor at Google at the age of 19, which took over one of the projects.
In 2017, he founded Medal with Iggy, whom he has known since kindergarten. The platform quickly became popular among gamers. This year, De Witte expects a billion videos to be uploaded to YouTube, he told Nieuwsuur.
Medal not only has the video footage of games, but also all the actions of the players. The actions on game consoles (left, right, shooting or accelerating) are also controlled by Medal. This gives the company “the largest data set of how people interact with each other and their environment in simulated worlds,” says De Witte.
I think we can catch up with Google in three years
This type of data is ideal for training ‘world models’, AI models that also have spatial insight. These models can, among other things, train robots and drones to independently perform tasks in the real world. The enormous databases containing mainly text and images that Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT are trained with are not built for this.
But De Witte had that when he founded the gaming company, he says in the podcast AI Report by Wietse Hage and Alexander Klöpping.
Defense systems
He is now convinced of becoming the most important developer of the new AI models, he says in Klöpping’s podcast. “I think we can catch up with Google in three years. Otherwise I wouldn’t have done it, I would have sold the company.”
According to the tech entrepreneur, Europe could easily become a forerunner in the field of ‘world models’, which relies more on mathematical and physical knowledge and capabilities than on AI language models. De Witte wants to develop this further using his game data, with his team consisting entirely of Europeans.
He is also aware of the power and possible influence of his company. “If it ever happens in , I think it is very good that we are a European company,” he tells Hage and Klöpping. The technology he develops for military systems such as drones, although his models are not currently trained for that. “,” he says in the podcast, the company “can hopefully build systems for defense within a few weeks or months.”
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